Croatia Has Average Poverty and the EU's Lowest Deprivation

Two questions that sound like one

Ask how many people in a country are poor and there are two defensible answers. One compares people to their neighbours: an income below some fraction of the national median. The other asks what they can actually afford: whether the household can keep the home warm, replace worn furniture, handle an unexpected expense, or spend a small amount on itself each week.

Eurostat publishes both. The relative measure sits inside the headline at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion rate; the absolute one is the material and social deprivation rate, which counts a person as deprived when their household lacks a set number of items from a standard list for reasons of affordability rather than choice.

Across the EU in 2025 the first reads 20.9% and the second 12.0%. They are not versions of the same number, and where they disagree is where the interesting cases are.

Greece, where deprivation exceeds poverty risk

Greece records 30.1% deprivation, the highest in the Union, against a poverty-risk rate of 27.5%.

That ordering is unusual. For most Member States the relative measure is the larger of the two, because a country can contain many people below its own median without those people being unable to afford basic goods. Greece is the case where the absolute measure is larger: more Greeks cannot afford items on the standard list than fall below the relative income line.

Romania at 26.8% and Bulgaria at 24.5% follow, both below their own poverty-risk rates but far above the EU deprivation average.

Croatia, where the two measures diverge most

Croatia records the lowest material and social deprivation rate in the European Union, at 4.4% — below Poland at 4.8% and Slovenia at 5.1%, and a third of the EU figure.

Its poverty-risk rate is 20.7%, essentially the EU average of 20.9%.

So on the headline measure Croatia is unremarkable, and on deprivation it is the best performer among twenty-seven countries. Both readings are correct. The relative measure is telling us that a fifth of Croatians have incomes well below the Croatian median; the deprivation measure is telling us that very few Croatians cannot afford the items on the list. Income inequality and material hardship are describing different things, and Croatia is where the distance between them is widest.

Why the comparison is worth making

Deprivation is measured against a common European list of items rather than a national income distribution. That makes it the measure to reach for when the question is whether people in one Member State are materially worse off than in another — the question the relative rate cannot answer, because its threshold moves with each country's own median.

The reverse also holds. Deprivation says nothing about how far a household sits from the standard of living around it, which is the exclusion the European framework is built to capture. Neither measure is the true one, and reporting either alone produces a ranking that a second, equally official ranking contradicts.